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Just before winning acclaim by signing a quasi-revolutionary health-care package into law, Massachusetts Governor WIllard Mitt Romney struck a more characteristic pose in naming prosecutor Lynn C. Rooney, 41, to a judgeship in the state's district court system.

Rooney's appointment, made official April 12 following a 5-2 vote by the Governor's Council, has been widely interpreted as her reward for sending ex-priest Paul Shanley to prison on featherweight child-molestation charges.

Except for a short detour into private practice, Rooney has been a workhorse at the Middlesex County DA's Office since 1989. She rose through the ranks to become Deputy First Assistant District Attorney, serving a densely populated area running from the northern rim of Boston to the New Hampshire line.

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Her occasional fairness has earned Rooney some defenders. Former inmate Dennis Maher, cleared of rape charges in 2003 with the help of the Innocence Project, points out that while some Middlesex County authorities obstructed access to exculpatory DNA evidence, "Rooney is the person who let all the DNA testing be done behind the scenes in my case."

But Maher was wrongfully accused of attacking adults. Cases involving children, especially alleged sex crimes, were Rooney's special mission.

"As happens all too often in that arena of life and law," observes attorney Harvey Silverglate, former president of the Massachusetts ACLU, "[Rooney] frequently lost all perspective and at times seemed unable to differentiate the minor from the major and, more important, the innocent from the guilty."

Many of Rooney's superiors and peers, from former Middlesex District Attorney Scott Harshbarger to present DA Martha Coakley, have built their reputations on sex-spiked child-abuse cases, basking in the kind of media coverage that cues an emotional, vote-strewn public response. But Middlesex County prosecutors are also prone to unfeigned righteous wrath and moral fervor.

"This is one of the hazards of having prosecutors specialize in a particular area of the law," says Silverglate. "They begin to see it as their God-given duty to rid society of the class of people within their telescopic sights, and eventually all their targets seem evil beyond description, and all seem obviously guilty."

Catholic crucible of hate

Like many of her colleagues, Rooney is a graduate of Boston College Law School, a Jesuit institution that immerses students in am acute, peculiarly Catholic awareness of the socially progressive and the sexually proscribed. That dual vision is central to the prosecutorial culture of the Middlesex County DA's Office, a culture Rooney exemplifies.

Early in her career, the budding prosecutor served on the team assisting Martha Coakley's efforts to obtain child-abuse convictions for Ray and Shirley Sousa-- Lowell, Mass., grandparents whose case, like Paul Shanley's, rested upon half-baked repressed-memory evidence. Later, Rooney took a high-profile role in attempts to keep the lid on Middlesex County's most notorious sex-abuse circus, in which daycare proprietor Violet Amirault, her daughter Cheryl, and her son Gerald, had been tried and convicted of preposterous charges based on the cultivated testimony of children barely old enough to talk.

At hearings in the late 90s, Cheryl Amirault-- her conviction overturned, then reinstated-- sought to preserve her freedom; Gerald sought commutation. (Their mother died in 1997.) Attendees remember the omnipresent ADA Rooney as ungainly and inept. Sullen and sweaty in frizzed-out hair and dowdy little-girl frocks, she looked like Alice in Wonderland nursing a mean mushroom hangover. (By 2005, before the Shanley trial, she was made over for stardom on Court TV.) Some assumed that DA Coakley was assigning Rooney cases her office expected to lose; the Amirault debacle, exposed in the national press by the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz and others, was becoming an embarrassment.

"Physical evidence" Rooney kept citing in the Amirault case amounted to little more than medical records showing that one toddler had two urinary infections while enrolled at the family's Fells Acres preschool. Rooney's efforts failed to return Cheryl to prison, or to persuade the Massachusetts Board of Pardons, which unanimously recommended his release, that Gerald was a menace to society. Nevertheless, thanks in part to Rooney's go-for-broke zealotry, Gerald's release came only in the normal course of parole. The Amirault case wore on after similar cases, around the nation, had been overturned; in 2006, both Gerald and Cheryl remain registered sex-offenders.

Rooney is a propagandist, relying heavily on innuendo, misinformation, half-truth, guilt by association, and exaggeration. She is fond of reciting lurid sexual detail, even if it is clearly fabricated. "He made them eat food off his penis!" she squealed at Gerald Amirault's commutation hearing. (She seems especially eager to find occasions to say the word penis.)

At the 2002 trial of ex-priest John Geoghan, Rooney argued forcefully for the maximum 10-year sentence, claiming the defendant had profoundly and permanently traumatized a 10-year old boy by touching his backside at a public swimming pool. The elderly miscreant, she insisted, posed a danger to all the young boys of the Bay State. (The following year, at the Sousa Baranowski Correction Facility in Shirley, Mass., Geoghan was strangled to death in his cell by a vocally homophobic, neo-Nazi inmate already serving a life term for murder.)

Dubious theology

In and out of Massachusetts, Rooney has presented at conferences and symposia addressing legal issues pertaining to child abuse. She maintains ties to victim/survivor groups such as the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP). Like her mentor and ex-colleague Wendy Murphy, an attorney affiliated with the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence, an organization of militant child-savers, Rooney is a dedicated proselytizer for junk science. Her performance at the Shanley trial demonstrated her unquestioning belief in the much-discredited doctrine of repressed memory.

Lacking intellectual resources to debate scientific findings, Rooney has let a formidable streak of bovine hauteur to bolt through its gate when cross-examining expert witnesses for the defense. Her behavior toward Maggie Bruck, one of the world's foremost experts on children's testimony, was notably boorish during a 1998 Amirault hearing. During the Shanley trial, she used smear tactics to discredit Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, listed by the Review of General Psychology as one of the 100 most distinguished psychologists of the 20th century.

When Paul Shanley was found guilty, Rooney was hailed (and condemned) for her skill at forging a conviction out of spectral evidence. Dispassionate observers knew, however, that she had lucked into an incompetent defense attorney and a gullible jury. Unfettered and unchallenged, Rooney's gift for agitprop easily prevailed. (See box.)

Harvey Silverglate optimistically notes that "bad, unfair, or overzealous prosecutors... once elevated to a judgeship, sometimes recognize the seriousness of the judicial calling and gain new perspective," adding that he hopes Lynn Rooney can undergo such a transformation. But others wonder if Rooney can relinquish her unrelenting zeal.

From Boston to Washington?

Mitt Romney, the Presidentially ambitious Republican governor who appointed Rooney to the bench, has been at odds with the state's merit system of judicial selection, prompting Edward Leiben-sperger, president of the Boston Bar Association, to state in a recent Boston Globe op-ed piece, "It appears that ideological compatibility with the governor is more important than the thorough evaluation of all the qualities of a good judge."

Ironically, Romney, a devout Mormon, has been a leading voice in the current right-wing chorus condemning "activist judges"-- such as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justices who voted in 2003 to permit gay marriage.

Ms Rooney's record invites expectations of judicial activism of a different sort. At Dedham District Court, while she will inevitably deal with minor sex crimes and matters of involuntary civil commitment, she will mainly hear small claims, civil, and misdemeanor cases. But like Judge Thomas Connors, the man she is replacing, Rooney can expect promotion to Superior Court, a venue where she will preside, on occasion, at the trials of persons accused of felonies dear to her heart.

"She will be a terrific judge," Rooney's boss Martha Coakley recently told the Concord (Mass.) Journal, the new judge's hometown paper. Ms Rooney lives in the historic, steeply upscale community with husband, District Court Judge Robert Brennan, whose father is also a judge. She will soon bring to the family coffers an annual salary of $112,777, plus generous pension benefits.